Can a great story transform a worthless trinket into a significant object? The Significant Objects project set out to answer that question once and for all, by recruiting a highly impressive crew of creative writers to invent stories about an unimpressive menagerie of items rescued from thrift stores and yard sales. Sold on eBay, objects originally picked up for a buck or so sold for thousands of dollars in total — making the project a sensation in the literary blogosphere along the way. But something else happened, too: The stories created were astonishing, a cavalcade of surprising responses to the challenge of manufacturing significance. Who would have believed that random junk could inspire so much imagination?

Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn, that’s who. This book — 232 full-color pages, gorgeously designed by Jacob Covey, and packed to bursting with photos and charts and diagrams — collects 100 of the finest tales from their unprecedented creative experiment.

About the Author

HiLobrow is a p(HiLo)sophical blog. Its analog publishing division is HiLoBooks, which in 2012–13 reissued 10 forgotten sci-fi classics. HiLobrow and HiLoBooks are edited by Joshua Glenn and published by King Mixer LLC.